


We Never Go Out Of Style

by stolenkissesprettylies



Category: One Direction (Band), Taylor Swift (Musician)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 12:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2547665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stolenkissesprettylies/pseuds/stolenkissesprettylies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"wanna go for a drive?” the text reads and Taylor can feel the lump in her throat forming. It’s so familiar, it feels like four months ago, when it was totally normal for Harry to drive over and pick her up. But it’s not normal, not anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Never Go Out Of Style

Taylor sits on the end of her bed, legs dangling over the side as she stretches back, tucked into a familiar shirt; plain black with a low plunging V neckline. It smells of mint, with a trace of the boy she was trying so hard to forget. She sighs and burrows herself under the sheets, Olivia meowing gently from behind the closed bedroom door. Taylor sighs and right as she rolls to her feet, her phone lights up on the nightstand. The name on the screen makes her heart stop for a moment.  
  
She’s heard that everyone has that person: the person that things didn’t work out with, for whatever reason and it’s over. But somehow, they’re always still around. That person that might show up at your wedding years later and say “Don’t do it, we’re not over yet.” The person it’s never really over with. The person who you try so hard to forget that all you can do is remember. Harry Styles was that person for Taylor.  
  
“wanna go for a drive?” the text reads and Taylor can feel the lump in her throat forming. It’s so familiar, it feels like four months ago, when it was totally normal for Harry to drive over and pick her up. But it’s not normal, not anymore. Not since the pressure became too much and a clean break was the easiest way to go. But nothing’s ever really clean is it, Taylor thinks bitterly.  
  
“i’m outside.” Taylor realizes she’s been staring at the phone for a few minutes with no response. Slowly, she pulls back her bedroom curtains and sure enough, there’s a familiar black Range Rover on the street, headlights off, only illuminated by the scattered streetlights.  
  
Taylor knows where this is leading. It’s never “just a drive” with them, it never was. It ended in screaming matches or screaming in a mattress. The thought gives her chills, and she doesn’t know which one causes it. But she looks down at her phone one more time, with the full intent to type a simple “No” and somehow ends up tugging on a jacket and sliding into a pair of flats, before walking out the door.  
  
The security guard downstairs, Bobby, gives her a curious glance as she walks past. She knows he recognizes the car. “Yeah,” she whispers and shrugs and his lips gather to one side, pursed in contemplation.  
  
“Call if you need me,” is all he says and follows her to the door, handing her the purse strung up from a peg on the wall. She gives him a tentative smile and shuts the door behind her, walking down the porch steps.  
  
Taylor counts each steps she takes, reaching 35 (maybe 37. When she saw a light coming from the car, illuminating a familiar face, she kind of lost count for a moment) before she opens the car door, triggering the lights inside the car to flicker to life.  
  
It’s strange. Time passes slowly as Harry lifts his head, green eyes piercing and Taylor stands, frozen.  
  
“Hi,” she manages to say before she’s just standing with her mouth open for too long. They pretended everything was fine for so long, maybe it was a nasty habit she had fallen into: smiling when you don’t feel like it, keeping your voice firm when all you want to do is cry.  
  
“Hi,” he replies, voice as deep as ever, if not deeper. His hair is longer, curls framing his face. Taylor had seen pictures one night, when she had a little wine in her, and had scoffed, claiming he looked like Mick Jagger as her girlfriends laughed and laughed. Face to face though, he just looked good.  
  
Taylor slides into the seat before she can think too much of it and Harry leans across the console as she’s buckling her seat belt to shut the door for her.  
  
His torso brushes against her arm and she tenses, a familiar feeling coiling in her gut. As quick as it arose, it dies, Harry leaning back into his seat after the door rattled closed and the lights shut off again, leaving them in a still darkness.  
  
There’s an awkward silence, before the keys turn in the ignition and Harry is pulling out, flicking the headlights back on as he drives down her street.  
  
“Where are we going?” she asks quietly and Harry shrugs.  
  
“I dunno.”  
  
Taylor nods, settling back into her seat, fingers fiddling with the zipper on her jacket as they drive.  
  
She glances over a moment later, and sees his hands tight on the wheel, knuckles white from the pressure. It’s a relief, to know he’s as tense as she is.  
  
It gives her the courage to say “So I heard you bought a house.”  
  
They reach a stop sign and he turns to look at her.  
  
“Yeah,” he replies. So much for that, Taylor thinks.  
  
After another minute of silence, she reaches for the radio dial but Harry’s voice stops her.  
  
“It’s only two streets away from here,” he admits quietly, and Taylor knows, oh Taylor knows.  
  
She’d heard it through the grapevine, through gossip magazines and brushed it off as rumors. The tabloids were probably trying to poke fun at the whole “Taylor Swift buys houses near her exes” stunt again.  
  
It was a nice dream land to live in, until Karlie let it slip one week at dinner, that it was true, she’d heard it from her realtor, since Taylor was trying to convince her to move out by her as well, and Taylor nearly choked on the pasta she was chewing.  
  
“Do you like it?” she asks, snapping back to reality.  
  
He nods, eyes straight ahead on the road.  
  
“I’ve… I’ve driven by a lot,” he says and it feels like a confession to an ungodly sin, like he’s afraid he’ll be martyred for the admission.  
  
It’s everything Taylor wanted to hear and everything she never wanted to hear all at once.  
  
“Oh,” she says quietly and this is backwards. She does all the talking, Harry always just smiles or stammers out a halfhearted response. She feels like a prisoner in the passenger seat that used to be only for her. This is all backwards.  
  
“I don’t know why,” he continues. “I guess… Just to see? Y’know? I thought about… Calling or stopping by but with the way things uh… ended, I figured maybe, I shouldn’t.”  
  
Taylor wonders which time he meant. They had ended a hundred times over.  
  
Did he mean the time things ended in a tense warfare in Taylor’s kitchen?  
  
“It’s just… Too much,” Harry had said, firing a round across the kitchen table.  
  
“But the girls you go out with every other night, they’re not too much, are they?” Taylor asks and it’s a grenade, leaving two victims’ prides as lone soldiers.  
  
When the smoke cleared, it was just Taylor and the sound of the front door closing.  
  
Harry had come back two days later, all wide eyes and silent looks and Taylor had ended up tangled up with him on her couch, stroking his hair back from his face as they decidedly didn't talk about it. They were good at that, avoiding everything that needed to be said, they were good at falling apart and coming back together over and over again.  
  
But she gets the feeling he's talking about the vacation they went on after New Years, after the pictures from the midnight kiss leaked and Taylor had never read such horrible things about herself. Harry suggested a trip, just the two of them, talked about margaritas and spreading her out on the beach. It sounded great, and it was, for the first two days at least. It was breakfast in bed and phones off in a drawer, memorizing every piece of each other.  
  
Even then though, even an escape from reality, an island with just them, proved still to be too difficult.  
  
The thing about that fight was there wasn't really a fight at all. Everyone thought there was. There were rumors of Taylor throwing all of his clothes off a balcony and lighting them on fire and People magazine had an imaginary source claiming Harry had shouted about her being a "neurotic freak". Perez Hilton swore up and down that Harry had brought a girl back to the hotel, but he hadn't. Nothing had happened. They were just sitting on their balcony, Taylor leaned against the railing, looking at the sunset as Harry sat beside her, looking anywhere but at her.  
  
The sound of the waves crashing against the rocks of the shore was the only thing she could hear besides the deafening silence that had overtaken them. There was no screaming or arguing, just the worst kind of silence. The distance between them, once bridged with feather kisses and light hearted jokes, was too wide.  
  
"This isn't working is it?" she asked sadly, and she didn't have to turn around to know his response. There was nothing left to say.  
  
So she packed up her bags and went home four days early, alone on a big boat with tears in her eyes. Harry helped carry her luggage to the pier and it felt like it should've been a moment: a moment where something should've been said, someone should've leaned in, something should've changed. But there was only a summer breeze and the weight of the world pressing down on their shoulders, so Taylor simply picked up her bags and their baggage and climbed aboard on shaky feet.  
  
“I’m not mad anymore,” she says, snapping back to reality, back to Harry's car where it felt like running away all over again.  
  
She was mad at some point, for a long period of time, honestly. She was furious. She was mad at Harry, for never trying hard enough. She was mad at herself, for falling again for a boy who never wanted to stay. But she could manage the fights with Harry. They always ended definitely in something: burning flames or paradise. She either felt high or low, but it was definite, one of the only definite things in her life. Somehow, there was an allure to arguing, to making up, to never knowing where the two of them stood. There was a romanticism behind being stranded, behind calling him at 2am and saying “You’re so bad but I so love you.”  
  
But mainly, she was mad at the world. The problem wasn’t her and Harry, she realized two months after the stalemate in the kitchen, still picking up the pieces from the mess they made. The problem was everyone else. When there were cameras pressed into the car windows, when Taylor had management take over her Twitter for three weeks when the death threats from thousands of One Direction fan accounts hit a little too close to home, when the whole world was against them, that’s when it fell apart. She couldn't manage that, because it never ended. She went home and buried herself under the sheets, closed all the blinds, but she could still feel the prying eyes boring into her. Everyday was a cycle on repeat: Wake up, pretend it's fine, fall asleep and dream about things being different.  
  
Even after all that, Taylor and Harry still worked in some twisted way. It was a constant battle, push and shove, hate and love, but it was theirs. It was a crooked love in a straight line down, that was how Taylor had described it one night, with a few glasses of wine in on her when she sat on Selena's kitchen floor and cried. But it worked. Until everyone decided that it didn’t work for them. So the rumors flew, the media attention never stopped, there were more lows than highs. Their hiding spots; motel rooms, deserted parks, backs of taxis, were all discovered. It was like being chased out of a foxhole, like a dirty secret. It was bound to come crumbling down eventually.  
  
“I was mad,” she continues and Harry is staring at her now, eyes open and earnest and God, she misses that. “I was so mad at everyone else, but I’m not mad at you, I can’t be anymore,” she sighs and splays her hand against the cool chill of the window, tracing out vague shapes and letters in the condensation.  
  
“When I found out you bought the house… I hoped you would call me and tell me to come outside. There’s a notebook in my room full of all the ways I imagined that happening,” she continues quietly and she hears a hitched breath from the curly haired boy in the driver’s seat.  
  
“I just don’t get why everyone else had to get involved,” she finishes with a bitter sigh.  
  
“Fuck everyone else,” Harry says venomously and Taylor’s head shoots up.  
  
“What?” she asks, but Harry is already whipping around in the middle of a road, back toward her house.

“I said fuck everyone else, this isn’t about them,” he elaborates and he says it so simply, like they hadn’t tried that for months, tried convincing themselves it was enough.  
  
She laughs gently in disbelief, shaking her head, but when she looks up to meet his eyes, they’re that piercing green, aflame with something familiar, something wild and she can’t breathe.  
  
He’s not even looking at the road anymore as they ease back down her street, before he’s shifting into park in her driveway and staring at her expectantly.  
  
She should say no. She recognizes that look in his eyes and this isn't that simple. They can say that they won't care when other people talk, but they're human. They're flesh and blood and words are the worst weapon. Taylor's been behind the trigger and staring down the muzzle. She didn't want Harry to be just another line in her songs, she wanted him to be the reason she never had to write again, she wanted him to fill the void ink never could. She wanted to be happy, but that was impossible when everyone finds out.  
  
But maybe, she muses when his green eyes glisten in the street lights, no one has to find out.  
  
She gives him a long look, eyes unguarded as they run down the stubble on his rugged jaw, the coat on his broad shoulders, down to his hands, wrapped together under the wheel.  
  
She opens the door silently, stepping down onto the pavement. She takes a step and turns around.  
  
“Are you coming?” she asks, and before she can see his reaction, she continues, knowing he’ll follow.  
  
She fumbles with her keys, as she hears the car door shut, and suddenly, she’s hyper aware of the warm body pressed behind her, waiting as she flips through her keys.  
  
She doesn’t realize her hands are shaking until familiar calloused fingers take the keys from her hand, slide the silver metal into the door and open it, bathing them in the dim light from the hall. Bobby is nowhere to be seen. Taylor wonders if he knew this would happen all along, like she did.  
  
A gentle hand on her back presses her forward, over the stoop, and it’s so familiar. It feels normal. It feels like four months ago, when they could just fade into each other and nothing was dangerous. But now, it screams a warning.  
  
He’s shutting the door behind him.  
  
Caution.  
  
He’s sliding off his coat.  
  
Flashing lights.  
  
He’s giving her that familiar look and her stomach is in knots.  
  
Danger.  
  
He’s sliding closer, hands reaching for the zipper on her jacket.  
  
God.  
  
He slides the zipper down slowly, staring straight into Taylor’s eyes, pale in the moonlight from the windows.  
  
Taylor can’t breathe. This is all too much. They said they were done and yet here they are falling together again, like they always seem to do.  
  
His hands feel so sure as the zipper keeps gliding down, an eternity passing before Taylor finally blurts “I heard you’ve been out with some other girl.”  
  
Harry can feel her heartbeat pounding as she says it, frenzied, as if she didn’t mean to let it slip. She spits “ _some other girl_ ”, like she doesn’t know her name, like she doesn’t know the story, but she does. Harry knows she does.  
  
She’s got a defiant look in her eyes, narrow eyebrows furrowed together, like they always are when she’s fighting her own mind. Harry’s missed that and it feels like his tongue is made of glue as she stares at him expectantly, waiting for a lie.  
  
“It’s true,” he whispers and Taylor’s eyes meet his, clouded with a cocktail of confusion and hurt. “But I can’t stop thinking about you,” he continues and his breath is right against her ear.  
  
And Taylor should be mad. This is the part where she would usually yell, push him away, say “I hate you” and the cycle would repeat. But Harry's got this desperation in his eyes, and yeah, Taylor’s been there too a few times.  
  
Harry’s about to go on, when the jacket finally slides off Taylor’s narrow shoulders and lands in a heap on the floor and he’s met with the familiar fabric of a shirt he noticed missing in his closet months ago.  
  
It leaves the sharp jut of her collarbone exposed, a plane of pale skin revealed, tracing down her chest, lower and lower.  
  
Taylor follows his gaze and instantly flushes a brilliant red, crimson stains on her cheeks and Harry doesn’t let her open her mouth to explain, to argue.  
  
Instead, he surges forward, lips pressing against hers hard, backing her into the staircase with greedy hands grasping at her waist.  
  
She makes a choked sound in his mouth before melting into the embrace, long arms coming up to wind behind his neck, fingers tangling into the mop of curls and tugging, like she knows he loves.  
  
A muffled groan falls from his lips, right into Taylor’s and suddenly he’s sliding his hands up and her feet are lifted from the ground as he trudges them toward the stairs, lips still locked together.  
  
Nothing is fixed. No one apologized. No one said anything. There were no explanations or talks of the future and nothing could just go back to the way it was, they both know that. But all Taylor can focus on right now is how right this feels.  
  
It feels like the night he took her dancing, wearing a faded white shirt and a crooked smile as he spun her around and around, nearly dropping her after a few cocktails and sloppy kisses. As they stumble into the bedroom, hands exploring familiar territory, Taylor is pretty sure that his grip won’t slip this time.  
  
\- - - -  
  
Harry wakes the next morning with a slow yawn, long limbs splaying across white sheets he could never forget. He reaches his arm out on instinct, searching for a familiar thin body, but finds nothing. He opens his eyes and scans the room, finding their clothes scattered on the floor still, but no trace of the blonde he memorized all over again last night.  
  
“Fuck,” he sighs and presses the back of his hand to his eyes tight. She always begged him to stay, to never sneak out at night and half the time, he obeyed, and the other half, he was gone with the sunrise. He wonders if this is some sort of revenge for those nights.  
  
It’s December all over again, he thinks bitterly as he climbs to his feet, gathering his clothes and sliding them on. He almost reaches for the v neck before he notices that it too is gone.  
  
So she can’t stay but she can take his clothes? If that’s how she wants to play, fine. Harry holds his coat in his hand as he goes downstairs, feet thudding loudly on the stairs. He’s reaching for the door when he hears quiet humming from the kitchen, and he knows who it is right away.  
  
Harry’s feet carry him to the kitchen and he freezes in the doorway when he sees Taylor sitting on the kitchen counter, long legs swinging back and forth slowly, wearing nothing but Harry’s shirt. Two steaming mugs of coffee sit by her side and  _oh,_   Harry thinks. A journal lay in her lap, pen moving quickly across the page, lips moving faintly as she talked to herself and Harry had never seen anything more beautiful in his life.  
  
He drops his coat on the table and she looks up at the noise, smiling softly when she sees him. “Good morning,” she says and Harry smiles bigger than he has in months and slides between her legs to pull her into a kiss, the journal falling to the side. When he pulls back, Taylor’s laughing and pressing a coffee mug into his hand, but all he can see are the words scrawled in the journal lying on the counter:  
  
_We never go out of style._  


**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first "fan fiction" ever and I didn't get into One Direction until about three weeks ago (I know, I know). But I'm proud of it, and Taylor is one of my heroes so if anyone is going to leave nasty comments about her, I please ask you don't! I'm obsessed with this song and though I wasn't sure how I felt about Haylor when they were together, I now want them back, SOS. Thank you for reading and feedback is super appreciated! :)


End file.
